The England Odyssey Part Four: Two Hours in the Imperial War Museum

This is another of those "We should have allowed a complete day" types of things but we only had a couple hours. What a frustrating pity.

Marlene giving scale to the two BIG guns (16" I believe) out in front of the Imperial War Museum. Click Here

One theme I seemed to see in every UK museum is that they worked hard to put everything in context, rather than just presenting artifacts in cases. They tell you the background, in this case the background of the conflict, what lead up to it, how it developed and how the hardware was adapted. Very educational, but you miss most of it when you to tearing through, as we did.

One of the real shames, although we could totally understand it, is that they didn't allow photographs to be taken in their Holocaust exhibit. This was a two-floor exhibit that was truly gutwrenching. This wasn't because of gruesome nature of the photography but because, again, they did such a good job of putting it in context.

They started out by painting a picture of life in Europe before the Nazi's and the integral role the Jewish community played in it. Then they showed how, little by little, it was brutally dismantled and destroyed. It is impossible to see pictures like a young girl being dragged away, her face a combination of disbelief, horror and absolute total dismay and not feel something deep inside. You keep thinking, "How could human beings do this to other human beings?" You can sense the power and utter disregard for humanity that characterized much of the Reich. It's hard to believe that politics could take an entire, and intelligent, population and pull them so far off into the dark regions of human thought. I've studied the Holocaust off and on for most of my life, but this one exhibit made the entire trip worthwhile because of the way it made it so real.

It's interesting to think how much the sacrifice of the Jews and other populations that Hitler hated contributed to the end of the war. The Jewish community thought of themselves as German first, Jewish second. Had he not persecuted them, they would have lent their numbers, their intellect and their finances to the war and made Hitler's war machine much stronger. Besides not being part of the machine, their demise actually weakened it because Hitler wasted so many resources just to satisfy his hatred that would otherwise have been at the front. Think of all the men and finances it cost him to build the camps, round up the people and then operate his camps. His uncontrollable hatred shortened the war in so many ways, but it nearly cost an entire population its life.

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Goodies and then some. Not many places you can look up at a V2 rocket with an FW-190 behind it.

Oddly enough, the French designed some stuff during WWI that had a lasting effect. With it's hydraulic/pneumatic recoil system, this 75mm gun set the standard for many later guns and was adapted, almost in its entirety to arm the Sherman tank. Click Here.	I love the various types of breeching systems artillery designers used. What is hiding here is that under the barrel is the revolutionary "long recoil" shock assembly that lets the barrel recoil back, rather than taking the entire gun back as happened with all guns prior to it. Click Here
This tells it better than I can. Note the range: 9,800 yards!! Click Here.	There are only a small number of complete FW-190's world wide. I love the short nose versions like this. Click Here.
Not being nautical in nature, I had no idea the German's had a one-man sub like this. It carries a torpedo on each side. Click Here.	I'd like this floating in my pool, wouldn't you? Click Here.
The Brits used a lot of our tanks and early on had a lot of M3 Grants in Africa. I'm not sure but I don't think any made it to the European theater because they were so obsolete. Click Here.	And speaking of tanks: I'll do a whole tank thing next time around, when we visit The Tank Museum in Bovington. They had a variety of these WWI monsters. Click Here.